One of the consequences of sentient biological existence is the experience dukkha.
Dukkha is sometimes translated as suffering but in actual fact encompasses all
senses of unsatisfactoriness, even including pleasure (which evolution has contrived
will always be a transient sensation - lest it detract too much from the grim
business of survival).
In its most manifest form dukkha includes severe suffering such as that
of the animal caught in a trap which will gnaw through its own limb in order
to attempt to gain some form of temporary survival, perhaps to return to its
young. At the other end of the scale is the subtle dissatisfaction of the billionaire
who has everything , and then discovers that his business rival has a slightly
larger yacht.
Dukkha ensures you can never have enough, you've always got to have more.
Any sentient being living in an evolved and evolving biosphere will inevitably
experience dukkha. Dukkha is the appearance to the mind of the habits of millions
of years evolution , of attempting to get the competitive edge, of never being
satisfied with second place, of perpetual restlessness. Darwinism shows that
evolution is a game that the individual cannot win. His genes drive him to compete
and propagate, but he is not propagating himself, he is propagating his selfish
genes. We spend our lives from birth to death acquiring nutrients to grow and
ensure our survival. Nowadays many of us acquire sufficient nutrients to actually
reduce our chances of survival, but instincts driven by genes developed during
millions of years of selection by famine don't disappear in a generation or
two of plenty.
We acquire every material need and even then we're not satisfied. Our instincts
drive us to acquire everything else we can lay our hands on. Things may be no
use to us, but our deep instincts tell us that by holding them ourselves we
are depriving our competitors (everybody but our immediate kin) of them. The
sociobiological roots of greed and attachment to possessions go deep into our
evolutionary past.
Evolutionary Psychology
Getting into the state of being satisfied sets the instinctive alarm bells ringing.
If you think you can drop out of the evolutionary race then all the habituation
of hundreds of millions of years of evolution will tell you not to.
Our genes drive us along paths of action which appear to minimise suffering,
but in many cases increase it. Greed and acquisitiveness are natural reactions
designed to increase the survival of our genes, and decrease the chances of
our competitors. After a certain point, the more you've got the more you've
got to lose, (even if it is just losing face) and so the more you've got to
worry about.
These instinctive strivings and attachments for things which are ultimately only going to cause us worry and unhappiness are known in Buddhist philosophy as innate delusions (as distinct from intellectually formed delusions such as memes). The innate delusions are considerably more difficult to overcome than intellectually formed delusions, however it is one of the fundamental tenets of Buddhism that they can eventually be brought into the light of day and removed. To quote Richard Dawkins 'We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against out creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.' [Dawkins 1989]
The Buddhist technique of rebellion against the selfish replicators, at any rate in the form of innate delusions, is to reduce the power of the forces which drive us by recognising them for what they are. This is traditionally performed by a mixture of analytical thought and meditation, and involves the recognition of four truths of biological existence:
(1) The first step is to recognise the inevitability of dukkha - the sense of unsatisfactoriness and the certainty of ultimate loss of everything, which haunts all sentient beings even in the absence of manifest suffering.
(2) The second is to recognise the origins of these futile strivings in
our biologically conditioned evolutionary history. If we want to stop being
the puppets of our genes and memes we need to clearly understand why we're attached
to these particular strings.
(3) The third step is to realise that it needn't be like this. This is perhaps
the most difficult one for a materialist. It involves realising that the root
mind is non-physical and that it can escape from the eternal evolutionary treadmill.
(4) The fourth step is adopting a liberating technology that stabilises
the root mind and protects it against uncontrolled attachment to further striving,
suffering, biological rebirths.
Original Sin
Note that the Buddhist concept of innate delusions is totally different to that
of 'original sin' found in some other belief systems. Innate delusions and their
imprints are seen as an inevitable consequence of where we've come from over
millions of years of evolution. There is no actual 'blame' or 'guilt' to them,
though of course the practitioner strives to understand them in order to overcome
them. The concept of original sin is theological rather than scientific in origin,
and derives from Eve's sin of eating the apple being passed down through all
subsequent generations.
- Sean Robsville